EVENTS

The yacht has nothing to do with it

Helen Lewis of the New Statesman wrote that the video is not feminist “because it is not very feminist to torture women. Even if they are white. Even if they are rich. Even if you are a woman yourself.” By those standards, I have a thing or two to say about a whole history of white women who abused black women both because they were black and because they were women, and yet, somehow, are still considered feminists – many regarded as pioneers. Women from Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who did not believe black women deserved any such rights as white women, to Miley Cyrus, who has used black women as stage props.

Then say it. Say what they did was very un-feminist. Say they weren’t feminists at all if you want to. That doesn’t make it feminist to torture women or to make videos about torturing women.

[W]hat really has white feminists upset is that in the video Rihanna, a black woman, puts her own needs before a white woman’s needs. And it’s clear that when those needs involve money, social class and privilege (say, lounging on a yacht), there is no room for perspective. White women will fight to obtain food stamps for black women, but don’t let us have a yacht, pretty clothes or – God forbid – payment of money we are owed.

Horse shit. Complete, unmitigated horse shit, and blatant deflection besides. It’s not about yachts and it’s not about getting money owed, it’s about torture of a bystander.

To be sure, the video is vividly violent – an unabashed revenge fantasy – but here’s what didn’t occur to me: is it anti-feminist? Feminist? Misogynistic? Why would it? Rihanna is a grown woman who makes life and career choices for herself with the expectation and understanding that she is as free to do that as her male peers are. How is that not feminist?

Wut? Grown women make life and career choices all the time, and some of them are bad, and we can and do say so. If a grown woman makes the career choice to murder someone, I don’t consider that a feminist act. Freedom to make the choice to torture and murder isn’t what feminism is about.

The obsession over what constitutes feminism in mainstream media and popular culture strikes me as resolutely anti-feminist. As for the misogyny – really? That’s just dumb, shortsighted and so deeply patronising. Because the assumption here is that Rihanna isn’t smart enough to anticipate the various interpretations of her work. She knows. She doesn’t care. I don’t either. What I care about is that Rihanna has the agency to create her music and direct her career on her own terms.

Agency shmagency. Mere “agency” is not enough. Agency is necessary for feminism but it is so very far from sufficient.

Comments

I wouldn’t think that every single thing a feminist does need be feminist for that person to be, overall, a feminist. Feminists can screw up, or can decide to do something non-feminist, at times.

I know some people who are anti-gay bigots, yet they did rather a lot to help a neighbor who was gay (and whose lifestyle wasn’t the sort that might mollify a bigot about gayness). Yet they are still anti-gay bigots.

Probably wasn’t clear enough, so flatly: Carroll is arguing against Helen Lewis’ statement that Rhianna’s video was not feminist by saying that Rhianna is feminist. I think it’s a logical fallacy, confusion of categories, I think it’s called (unless I’m suffering from confusion of some sort). Rhianna can be, most of the time, a feminist and still make a non-feminist piece of art.

That’s the way I view it too. On the other hand if Rebecca Carroll wants to say Stanton was no feminist since she excluded black women from feminism, I’m not going to disagree with her. A racist feminism is certainly a radically incomplete form of feminism, at the very least.

So much political analysis. So little basis. My bet is that this is all there was to it:

Who’d pay money to watch a video of a male accountant being tortured? Nobody, said the marketing guys. (Somehow, I have the feeling they were guys.) I know! said one of the bright wits. Let’s do a pornified video of a woman being tortured. Then we’ll make money!

Elizabeth Cady Stanton didn’t believe black women deserved the same rights as white women? Citation needed. Stanton started her career as an abolitionist as was in favor of universal suffrage, for blacks and for women, and I would assume that includes black women. She unfortunately (and inexcusably) withdrew her support for voting rights for African Americans due to an ugly political battle with leaders in that movement, including Frederick Douglass. The suffragette and abolitionist movements had been allies for a long time (many women, including Stanton, gaining their first political experience at abolitionist meetings), and initially Stanton believed the two goals were and should be yoked. But towards the end of the 19th century, public opinion for enfrancising (male) African Americans was ahead of that for women, and leaders in the fight for African American suffrage realized that if they included enfranchisement for women in what would become the 15th amendment, it probably wouldn’t pass, so they refused to include it. (Leaders like Frederick Douglass were supportive of women’s suffrage, but didn’t want it to stand in the way of their own.) Stanton felt betrayed by this political move and dropped her support for the black (male) vote. As I recall she did say some rather vile things around this time as well. Stanton wasn’t perfect and may have held racist views. But I think it’s a real mischaracterization to say she believed “black women did not deserve any such rights as white women.”

Years ago I went to an alternative/maker/neopagan festival in an abandoned building in a nearby town. The evening before the festival they showed movies made by some of the participants, on a sheet in one of the rooms in the building. I walked in just as one was starting. The first scenes were a woman riding a bicycle along a deserted path. Some kids came out and pushed her bike over, and grabbed her, and took her somewhere, and tied her up. At that point I walked out–I didn’t think this story was likely to develop in a way I’d be interested in seeing.

I later happened to talk with the partner of the man who made the movie. She did confirm that the movie went on to show the torture and murder of the woman. ‘Oh,’ she explained, ‘he’d been mugged recently and wanted to make a movie to express how he felt about that.’ OK, I tried to say to her, you’re telling me that the most meaningful and authentic way this man could devise to tell a story about his own experience of helplessness and fear was to make a movie about torturing and killing a woman…just like every blockbuster Hollywood horror movie ever made. Right. Not super-impressed with this independent, creative, alternative, edgy and daring art. (Apparently this guy got an actual grant to make this movie.)

I’m wondering if anyone can help me out with some ideas about why conversations like this inevitably turn to ‘what the person who made/did this thing is’ rather than ‘what this thing we’re talking about is’. It’s pretty clear that a graphic movie about torturing a woman as a stand-in for a man is misogynistic. So why do we care whether Rihanna is or isn’t a feminist? I wouldn’t consider myself A racist, but I’ve certainly thought/said/done racist things, and I’m sure I’ll think/say/do more racist things in the future. (Undoubtedly more than I think I do, since I wouldn’t rely on myself to identify every time I’m being racist.) I think that calling out and critiquing my racist acts is a lot more productive than having a conversation about whether I’m a racist or not.

Can we maybe just stop using “racist”, “feminist”, “misogynist”, etc. to refer to people, and use them instead to refer to actions and words? That would short-circuit both this issue, where the action can’t be misogynist because we are certain the person doing it isn’t, and the reverse, where since the person said something racist, she must be a racist.

Crommunist taught me that approach (only without run-on sentences). I still miss him around here.

Stanton was probably what we would consider racist today, but is it fair to judge someone from the 1800s by that standard?

In any case, if you’re going to say she can’t be a feminist because she was racist, you should say nobody can be an anti-racist if they were sexist. Which would include Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X.

Can we maybe just stop using “racist”, “feminist”, “misogynist”, etc. to refer to people, and use them instead to refer to actions and words? That would short-circuit both this issue, where the action can’t be misogynist because we are certain the person doing it isn’t, and the reverse, where since the person said something racist, she must be a racist.

That way of looking at things is clearer and more helpful, I think. All hail the Crommunist.

Wow, okay, did anyone actually watch the damn video? Because a.) it’s really not that violent, b.) the white woman really isn’t that tortured. She’s not treated well, certainly, but she’s given drugs when the rest of the crew takes drugs and taken with them where they go and not physically actually hurt by the standard of music videos in general. c.) the woman is taken as a hostage, to negotiate with the accountant, not for the purpose of torturing her for his sins d.) when the accountant decides his money means more than his girlfriend, they go for him directly. The violence isn’t shown, only Rihanna at the end lounging in a suitcase full of money, covered in blood.

Damn. I’ve been reading about this since it came out, and I was like “huh, maybe torture porn of a woman really isn’t the most feminist of messages” but the violence against this woman in this video is really, really mild. I’m actually really astonished. I’m much more upset at someone like the Daily Mail reporter writing shit like “”“I’m actually starting to wonder whether she might not have some kind of medical condition which prevents her from keeping her legs – as well as her stupid trap – shut.”” (about Rihanna, now). That’s disgusting. That’s against every single thing feminism stands for.

Well, I hadn’t watched the video because it sounded like something I didn’t want to see, but for the sake of understanding the discussion I finally did. I can’t really agree with Gen that “it’s not really that violent” or that “the white woman isn’t really that tortured” — being hung upside down naked, smashed over the head with a bottle, nearly drowned, and force-fed drugs (it’s clear she’s not taking them consensually) are all pretty violent in my book. But, it’s definitely not beyond the pale for a violent revenge fantasy movie or your typical action flick.

I’m not a big fan of the story, but I’m finding it an interesting exercise to imagine a version of it with an all-male cast: male criminal protagonist gets screwed over by rich male bigwig, kidnaps and tortures the bigwig’s male friend as leverage, and finally kills the bigwig (and probably the friend) to take what he feels he’s owed. It’s a nasty story, but it seems like Hollywood makes this movie at least once every few years, without a whole lot of comment. I do think that the reason people are more outraged at Rihanna’s video is because the criminal protagonist is a woman, inflicting violence on another woman, and the fact that it’s a black woman torturing a white woman probably does enhance the outrage. Culturally we’re relatively comfortable with morally compromised male protagonists, but old notions of women being avatars of purity and virtue (at least, “proper” women) still influence the way we perceive female protagonists in fiction.

I don’t think the story in BBHMM is feminist, but I don’t think it’s particularly misogynistic either. The display of both the protagonist’s and the victim’s breasts could just be cheap capitalizing on the female body, or it could be a way to deliberately juxtapose the femininity of both characters against the brutality and violence committed by one against the other, essentially “feminizing” the violence, or conversely making femininity violent. I don’t know what Rihanna’s intent was, but I think it probably has both effects on the audience at some level, the former attracting them and the latter repelling.

I’m not sure whether Rihanna’s act of telling the story of BBHMM is feminist or not. Like Ophelia, I don’t buy Rebecca Carroll’s argument that it’s feminist just because it’s an expression of Rihanna’s agency; Phyllis Schlafly has spent her life using her agency to destroy feminism. But I do think that the story forces us to examine the double standard in our general acceptance and even pleasure in stories celebrating male violence and villainy versus our discomfort and horror at stories celebrating female violence and villainy. Perhaps I would prefer that we question our celebration of violence and villainy in general, but the highlighting of this double standard is at least an attack on unquestioned gender norms, which certainly seems to have feminist implications to me. Whether this was part of Rihanna’s intent in telling this story, I don’t know.

I do think that the reason people are more outraged at Rihanna’s video is because the criminal protagonist is a woman, inflicting violence on another woman, and the fact that it’s a black woman torturing a white woman probably does enhance the outrage.

Oh please – you think I would find it more appealing if it were a white woman torturing a black woman? Hardly – that would be another level of disgusting.

Culturally we’re relatively comfortable with morally compromised male protagonists, but old notions of women being avatars of purity and virtue (at least, “proper” women) still influence the way we perceive female protagonists in fiction.

Ophelia, I’m sorry if it came across that I was attempting to analyze your response to the video; I had no such intention. When I said “people” I meant many people generally, not you specifically. I take your opinion as you wrote it at face value. I’m just trying to process and understand what about the video elicits the kind of responses that Gen quoted from the Daily Mail. I associate that kind of anger with someone who thinks their worldview is under attack, and I thought I had an idea of what about the video that type of person might find so threatening. I’m sorry for expressing it poorly.

Lady Mondegreen, I was thinking less “Kill Bill” and more “Breaking Bad,” and other cases where the protagonist is genuinely villainous. TV Tropes has a list of examples from movies, many of whom do really heinous things in their stories, and it’s interesting to note how overwhelmingly male-dominated the list is (though of course there’s a lot more male protagonists in movies in general so take that with a grain of salt).